Not long ago, maps appeared online which allowed users of the Worldwide Web to move back and forth and zoom in and out of practically anywhere on Earth. Corresponding satellite imagery soon followed.
More recently, Google Earth, as made available from Google, Inc., made the leap from 2D to 3D representation enabling users to “fly” (control their position and orientation) in virtual 3Dspace rather than move over the 2D surface of a map or photograph. Google Earth initially relied on topographic information to create hills, mountains, and valleys in the landscape. Recently, these 3D models added simplified extruded building models with simplified (e.g., blank gray) surfaces.
Current work in government, universities, and corporations include building camera cars to sweep through cities, using aerial camera systems, integrating laser radar (“lidar”) data, and developing the necessary computational resources to integrate all the data. Such models have been envisioned as exhibiting “ground truth,” that is, they will be verifiably accurate when compared to the physical world.
So far, such 3D models have been created as closed, centralized efforts, but various methods have been developed that allow a community of users to create novel applications “on top of” them. For example, Google has made public their Application Program Interfaces (APIs) for Google Maps and Google Earth, allowing other data to be integrated, or “mashed up,” into their 2D map or 3D model. One popular “mash-up” application, Mappr, built on top of Yahoo's Flickr, allows a community of users to place their own photographic images in the location in which they were taken. But to date, such photos have only appeared as hovering “playing cards,” rather than seamless and integrated.
One solution in the prior art has been to integrate multiple images into the same model (though time artifacts, another potential problem, may occur if the multiple images are captured at different times). Another solution has been to artificially “fill in” the missing information, either by hand (like touching up a photo with a hole in the middle) or in some automated way. A great deal of research is currently underway seeking these kinds of solutions.
While prior art techniques, as described previously, have been developed, currently no techniques exist for a community of users to place their own images into these emerging rich 3D models in an integrated and seamless way, without any visible artifacts.